(Authors disclaimer: if you're a kid, skip that chapter babe ദ്ദി(˵ •̀ ᴗ - ˵ ) ✧)
Hua's POV
We didn't speak.
The silence between us was no longer hollow, like the one in the hotel room after he'd left. This silence was solid.
Substantial. Filled with the echo of the champagne flute shattering, the ghost of his father's shocked face, and the lingering, desperate warmth of our hands clasped together in a concrete stairwell.
He stood beside me, his shoulder brushing mine with each slight sway of the ascent. The fluorescent light bleached the color from his skin, highlighting the tension still etched around his mouth, but his eyes, when they flicked to mine, held no trace of the cold fury from before. They held something quieter. Something wary, and wondering.
The doors slid open on my room's floor. We walked side by side down the hushed corridor, the patterned carpet absorbing our footsteps.
Inside the room, the lingering twilight had deepened into proper night. The city beyond the window was a tapestry of electric stars. I locked the door behind us, the final click a period at the end of the chaotic sentence we'd just lived.
I leaned back against the wood, letting out a breath I felt I'd been holding since the moment I saw his father walking toward him.
The adrenaline was gone, leaving a profound, bone-deep weariness in its wake. My dress, where the champagne had splashed back, was stiffening unpleasantly against my thigh.
Yichen stood in the middle of the room, his back to me, looking out at the glittering skyline. His jacket was gone, left somewhere in the chaos. His white shirt was rumpled, the sleeves still pushed up his forearms. He looked less like a CEO and more like a shipwreck survivor washed up on the shore of a too-quiet island.
A strange, hysterical laugh bubbled up in my throat, born of exhaustion and the sheer, ridiculous tragedy of it all.
"You know," I said, my voice sounding hoarse and strange in the quiet. "All that drama. The spying, the hiding, the near-corporate heart attack. All because I fell in love with two brothers."
The words were meant to be sarcastic. A bitter punchline. But they fell into the room with the weight of a stone dropped into a still pond.
Yichen went very still. Then, slowly, he turned.
He didn't smile. He didn't get angry. He just looked at me, his expression unreadably complex in the half-light. He crossed the space between us in three strides.
"Stop," he said, his voice low and gravelly.
"Stop what?"
"Blaming yourself." He was close now. I could see the faint shadow of stubble along his jaw, the tiny flecks of darker brown in his eyes. "This isn't your fault, Hua. It was in motion long before you ever walked into an empty street and kissed a stranger."
He said it with such flat, weary certainty that the sarcasm died on my lips. This wasn't a platitude. It was a confession.
"What do you mean?"
He ran a hand over his face, the gesture one of profound fatigue. The mask of the unflappable heir was completely gone. In its place was just a man, tired of carrying something heavy.
"Yiran," he began, then stopped, searching for the words. "He hates me. You've figured that much out. But you think it's because I have what he wants. You."
He shook his head, a short, sharp movement.
"It's because of what he is."
The room seemed to grow colder. I pushed away from the door, drawn into the gravity of his pain.
"His mother," Yichen continued, his gaze fixed on a point past my shoulder, in the past. "She wasn't my father's wife. Not then. She was the mistress. For years. Yiran was the secret, living in a nice apartment across town, brought out for carefully curated 'family' dinners when my mother was visiting her own family. A dirty little secret with my father's eyes."
His voice was detached, clinical, as if reciting a corporate history he'd memorized but never felt.
"I was ten when I understood what he was. What it meant. I was a horrible little brat to him. I had everything—the name, the public recognition, the rightful place. And he had nothing but our father's guilty money and a mother who whispered poison in his ear about what should have been his. He would follow me around, this small, quiet boy, trying to share his toys. Trying to be my brother. And I would look right through him. I'd tell him to go back to his other house."
A sharp ache pierced my chest. I saw it then—not the powerful man before me, but a confused, angry boy, weaponizing his legitimacy against a shadow.
"When my mother died," Yichen said, the words barely audible, "it was less than a year before his mother moved into our house. The portrait in the foyer was replaced. The narrative was rewritten. He was no longer the secret. He was the consolation prize. The spare heir. And I… I was the relic of a dead woman, living in the house with the woman who'd helped make her life miserable. The resentment wasn't one-sided anymore. I gave him every reason to hate me. I built the foundation for it."
He finally looked at me, and his eyes were raw with a truth I don't think he'd ever spoken aloud.
"So you see," he said softly. "He doesn't just want what I have. He wants to be me. To erase me. To finally prove that the legitimate son was never worth more than the secret one. And you… you were the one thing he chose for himself, that he had before I did. Losing you to me isn't just a heartbreak. It's history repeating. It's me taking again."
The weight of his words settled over the room, dense and suffocating. All the pieces shifted, clicking into a uglier, more tragic picture. This wasn't a simple love triangle. It was the bloody finale of a decades-old civil war, and I was the contested territory.
The anger I'd felt toward Yiran, the frustration, it didn't vanish. But it was now underscored by a terrible, clarifying pity. He was a man shaped by a lifetime of being second-best, of living in a brother's shadow cast by their father's sins.
But pity was not absolution.
I closed the last step between us. He didn't move, just watched me with those exhausted, haunted eyes. I reached up and placed my palms on either side of his face. His skin was warm, the line of his jaw tense under my touch.
"Listen to me," I said, my voice firm, cutting through the history he'd woven around us. "You were a child. A hurt, grieving child. He was a child. Your father was the architect. He is the one who made a secret, then a contest, out of his own sons."
My thumbs brushed over his cheekbones. "You didn't do anything wrong by being born first to the right woman. And Yiran… he's not a tragic hero. He's a grown man. A spoiled, rotten man who never learned that throwing a lifetime tantrum doesn't mean you get everything you want. Including me."
Yichen's eyes searched mine, as if looking for the lie, the placation. He found only certainty.
A shudder went through him. The rigid control he'd held snapped.
He kissed me.
It wasn't like the kiss in the hallway—that was hunger, desperation, proof of life. This was different. Softer. Almost clumsy. It was the kiss of a boy who'd never been comforted, who didn't know how to accept absolution except by trying to consume it. It was heartbreakingly tender.
I kissed him back. I poured every ounce of understanding, every shred of the fierce, protective loyalty that had made me throw that champagne, into it.
I see you. Not the heir. Not the strategist. You.
The kiss deepened, shifting on its axis. The tenderness sparked, caught fire, and blazed into something urgent and consuming. His hands came up to cradle my face, then slid down, one anchoring at the small of my back, pulling me flush against him. The other hand fumbled with the zipper at the back of my dress.
The sound was loud in the quiet room. A slow, yielding rasp.
I broke the kiss just enough to shrug my shoulders, letting the damp, stained fabric pool at my feet. I never looked away from him. His gaze was a physical heat, sweeping over my skin, leaving a trail of fire in its wake. There was awe there, and a possessiveness that felt different now—not about claiming a prize, but about sheltering a sanctuary.
He yanked his own shirt off over his head, buttons scattering like tiny pearls across the carpet. The city lights painted the planes of his chest, the faint scars, the evidence of a life lived under pressure.
Then we crashed together again.
This was not careful. This was not strategic. This was a conflagration.
His mouth was on mine, then tracing a searing path down my jaw to my throat. A low moan escaped me, the sound seeming to vibrate through him. He made a rough sound in response, his hands mapping my back, my waist, learning the geography of me as if memorizing it for a trial.
He kissed me like he was drowning and I was the only air left in the world. I clung to him, my fingers digging into the hard muscles of his shoulders, arching into his touch. Every thought, every memory of the past ten years, every fear about the future—it all burned away in the pure, obliterating present of his skin against mine.
He walked me backward, his mouth never leaving my skin, until the backs of my knees hit the edge of the enormous bed. We tumbled onto it in a tangle of limbs, the cool duvet a shock against my heated skin. He hovered above me, his weight braced on his elbows, his dark eyes reflecting the city's glow and something infinitely more primal.
"Hua," he breathed, my name a prayer and a claim.
I reached up, pulling him down to me, answering with my body what I couldn't yet say with words.
Then—
Knock.
Knock knock.
The sound was polite, firm, utterly out of place in our private inferno.
We froze.
My heart, which had been hammering against my ribs, seemed to stop entirely. Yichen went rigid above me, his head turning sharply toward the door.
Knock knock.
It came again. Insistent. Unignorable.
A frustrated, animal sound tore from Yichen's throat. He dropped his forehead to my shoulder, his breath hot and ragged against my skin. "Don't move," he growled, the words vibrating through me.
But the spell was broken. The real world, with its consequences and its knocking, had shouldered its way back in. I scrambled up as he rolled off the bed, my hands fumbling for my discarded dress. He was already stalking toward the door, pulling on his trousers with quick, angry motions, his chest still bare.
"Yichen, wait—" I hissed, my voice choked, the dress only halfway up my arms.
He didn't wait. The look on his face was one of pure, unadulterated fury at the interruption.
"I swear to god," he muttered, his hand closing around the doorknob, "if it's Yiran—"
He yanked the door open.
It was not Yiran.
Zhang Wei stood in the hallway, his expression as meticulously composed as ever, but his eyes held a glacial chill that instantly doused the last of the heat in the room. He took in the scene with one swift, devastatingly perceptive glance: Yichen, shirtless and furious in the doorway; me, behind him, clutching my dress to my chest, my hair a wild cascade around my flushed face.
A muscle ticked in Zhang Wei's jaw. If he felt any surprise, he buried it deep.
"Sir," he said, his voice clipped and devoid of all warmth. "We need to talk. Now."
Yichen didn't move, blocking the doorway with his body. "It can wait."
"It cannot." Zhang Wei's gaze flicked past him to me, then back. The message was clear: This involves her. She should hear this.
With a final, frustrated exhale, Yichen stepped back, allowing him entry. He didn't bother with his shirt, as if defying the propriety Zhang Wei represented.
Zhang Wei stepped inside, closing the door softly behind him. He didn't venture further into the room. He stood near the entrance, a harbinger in a tailored suit.
"Your father knows you're here," he stated, no preamble. "The champagne incident was… noted. But that's not the concern."
He paused, letting the silence thicken.
"He has had your electronic activity monitored since the engagement headline. Your location is no secret to him. The question he is currently posing to his inner circle…" Zhang Wei's eyes locked onto Yichen's. "…is not if you are here, but why."
He delivered the next words with surgical precision, each one a scalpel.
"He is asking: 'Is my son at this conference for the company's future? Or is he there for his brother's first love?'"
The air left the room.
The question hung between us, ugly and reductive and devastatingly astute. It reduced the hurricane of emotion, the shared history, the fragile new thing trembling between us in this room, down to a single, damning choice: Business, or a woman?
It framed me, once again, not as a person, but as a liability. A scandal. A weakness.
Yichen's hands clenched at his sides. I watched the conflict rage across his face—the CEO calculating damage control, the man wanting to rage at the insult.
Zhang Wei wasn't finished. He looked directly at me now, his gaze impersonal, as if assessing a piece of problematic data.
"The answer he accepts," Zhang Wei said, his voice dropping to a near-whisper that was somehow louder than a shout, "will determine which one of you survives the fallout."
Then, with a slight, formal nod, he turned and left, closing the door on the wreckage of our almost-happened future, leaving us alone with the impossible choice his words had made real.